Cognition: Introduction Flashcards
What is cognitive psychology concerned with?
How the mind represents and uses information about the outside world.
What are mental representations
Representations such as an image or a veral concept of some external concept.
Cognitive psychology is the study of how humans;
Acquire information,
store information in memory,
Retrieve information,
work with information to reach goals.
When are surgeons most likely to forget objects in people during surgery?Why could this be?
During emergency surgeries, when the patient has high body mass or there is an unexpected change in the surgery. This could be cognitive factors influencing the operating environment.
Describe the procedure of an experiment where applied cognitive psychology assisted surgeons.
10 experienced and 10 inexperienced scrub nurses wore eye trackers during cesarean section surgeries. The main areas of interest were the operation site itself, the patients lower body, the surgical tray and the main instrument trolley. Frequency, Duration of counts as well as interruptions and the stage of the surgery was tracked.
What were the results of the scrub nurse experiment?
More experienced nurses placed more focus on the incision area. The nurses performed an average of 7 counts, roughly 9% of the time and were interrupted on average twice. The experienced nurses had fewer interruptions and only allowed the surgeon to interrupt them with fewer attention switches. This highlights the importance of experience in counting fluency and efficiency.
What requirements of a magician are linked to psychology?
Ability to identify and manipulate the limits of human memory, attention and perception.
Give three examples of psychological vulnerabilities magicians may take advantage of
A visual illusion, when the subjective experience of a visual stimulus differs from physical reality. E.g the bendy spoon which relies on differential responding of motion on motion detecting neurons in the visual system.
Misdirection, Drawing the spectators attentions away from the action (throwing ball.)
Verbal suggestion (spoon continuing to bend.)
What is the method of loci
vivid memories are formed linking the objects to be remembered to a sequence of familiar places such as your house.
What are mnemonics?
A learning device used to aid memory.
What is the keyword method of memory?
When learning languages using an interactive visual system. (eglise= church carved from an egg.) Imagery makes names more memorable.
What is meant by the phonetic number system or the major system?
A system that converts numbers to consonant sounds. 2=/n/ 3=/m/ 0=/z/
What did empiricists believe regarding knowledge and memory? What items affect this?
It all comes from experience and memories and ideas were linked by associations. (classic conditioning.) Proximity, similarity and time effect these associations.
What did Wundt hope to do through introspectionism
Focus on conscious experience and break down complex experiences into elementary sensations. (mental chemistry.)
What was the favoured form of introspectionism? Describe this process
Classical introspectionism involved specially trained participants giving a verbal account of their sensations in terms of mode (visual, auditory, tactile etc) quality (colour, shape, texture etc) intensity, duration and feeling (positive, negative, relaxed, tense.)
How many trials were seen as sufficient to master introspectionism?
10,000
What problems arose in introspectionism?
Extensive training required, very limited population applicable, only applied to some mental processes (can’t describe vision,) it often confounds the the cognitive process of interest. (ie process of solving a maths problem.) As well differences in lab results were hard to resolve.
What was the behaviourist approach? Where did it focus?
Inferencing on the mind based on only observable behaviour and stimuli as its data. The focus was on learning and how behavioural responses could be predicted from knowing the history of rewards and punishments following behaviour in response to particular stimuli.
What did Watson propose regarding the relationship between behaviour and thinking
All apparently mental phenomena could be traced to behavioural activity, thinking is just the slight movement of muscles in the tongue and larynx.
How was Watson’s theory of thought disproven?
When experimenting the effects of the poison curare on the sensation of pain and consciousness, the anaesthesiologist Scott M Smith discovered he could think ‘as clear as a bell’ the entire time he was completely paralyzed.
Describe the experiment Scott M Smith underwent
Pulse and blood pressure was taken, 11 minutes later curare in the form of D-tubocurarine chloride was administered at a dose of two and a half times the amount usually used to induce complete muscle paralysis. Over the next 15 minutes he reported feeling ‘dizzy and quite a glow.’ Jaw muscles became weak and had difficulty speaking, walking and keeping his eyes open. After 20 minutes he couldn’t speak. By 24 minutes he could indicate that he understand questions by wrinkling his forehead only. At 32 minutes only movement in his left eyebrow and at 45 minutes even that was gone. An antidote was administered and he was almost back to normal at 4 hours.
Is speech independent of movement of the speech musculature?
No
Did all behaviorists support the view of Watson on the status of mental activity? Give an example
No, behaviorists such as Tolman allowed that rats could be seen as having goals and form mental maps that aided in learning the layout of mazes.
What did Tolman want to show through his rat maze experiment?
Learning could occur in the absence of an obvious source of reinforcement, supporting the notion of a cognitive map or abstract representation underlying performance.
What did Tolman’s rate maze experiment entail?
3 groups of rats were exposed to a maze every day for 22 days. Hungry rats had to run from start to end. Group 1 had food at the end every day, group 2 had none and group 3 had from the 11th day onward.
What were the results and conclusion of Tolman’s rat maze?
Group 1 learned a lot quicker than either group and made less mistakes. However group 3 steeply learned quickly once there was food and even surpassed group 1 in speed after two days. This shows they had learned the maze independent of rewards.
